Resistance: YA comic about the kids who served in the French resistance

Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis's Resistance: Book 1 is the first installment in a series of historical comics telling the story of young children who aided the French resistance during the period of Nazi occupation during WWII. Told from the point of view of two young children in a rural French town who, as their Jewish neighbors are rounded up, hide away their Jewish playmate in a wine-cave, and so find themselves working their way into the resistance.

Told in a simple, straight-ahead style that can be appreciated by young people and adults alike, Resistance works a large amount of factual material about WWII into a brisk, exciting story. The creators do a wonderful job of capturing the variety of motivations and personalities at work in the resistance, and the tensions that arose between patriots, the Jewish underground and people whose fight was more personal.

War stories are a staple of YA literature, and the easy entree provided by the graphic novel format makes this an especially good title to read with a young person to kindle or feed an interest in history.

Resistance: Book 1

• [rebdav]

  What is sad about France and most other countries in Europe with Denmark being a glaring exception is that the majority did collaborate and even celebrate their liberation by their fellow Aryans who did for the most part settle that pesky Jewish problem forever.
  At least Germans had to face up to their collective crimes even if that generation followed their European brothers by pretending they didn’t really know or have responsibility for what happened.
  Big props and thanks to those few who were aware enough to fight the evil but it makes sense for murderers to whitewash the blood stains. Europe mostly fails to remember their own hand in those crimes and for the historic record points their fingers at a few top Nazis.

  • [adonai]

    Being conquered is rather different from actively collaborating, you idiot.

  • [Anonymous]

    Collaborating with the germans was not a crime per se because most of the time you didn’t really have the choice. Being involved in the deportation is another thing.

    French officials were actually tried for their involvement in deporting jews, for having executed civils, etc. The most recent case is Maurice Papon:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Papon

  • [fontastique]

    Your ignorance is staggering, 60 000 French forces died defending France from German invasion, many died covering the retreat of 200000 British forces in Dunkerque along with 100000 allies.
    French forces had pushed back Italian troops in the battle of the Alps… 6millions French and Belgian civilians massed on the roads running from German Luftwaffe that bombed the roads to cause panic and preventing French troops to get to the Front.
    Men were dying everywhere when Petain, after putting interior minister Georges Mandel in Prison, declared there should be an truce signed with the Germans, while most say that the battle can continue if they gather in French North Africa.

    So, this in mind, NO, France did not welcome with open hands their fellow aryans.

    active collaboration did happen, as did active resistance, but as many pointed out here, the vast majority of French people had to get on with their lives and that meant either passive resistance or passive collaboration.

  • [geessebeschleier]

    I’m not from France bur here’s a bit of my family’s history , my grand-father had 6 brothers and 1 sister , he didn’t actively resist but slept on resistance ammo crates stashed under his bed, 3 of his brothers were involved in active resistance the 3 others were “collaborating”, when he was called to leave for forced labour in Germany, the German officer who checked his id at the local kommandantur wasn’t German at all , they were in fact former school comrades , not a word was exchanged , his papers were stamped and he was sent home with an “unfit for work” mention (which was of course not the case).
    Every family member knew who was involved on either side.
    I was lucky enough to know most of them (all have passed now) and had extensive talks about that period and rest assured that most of us would have either shut up or “collaborated”,when you have a family to protect and take care of it’s a whole different perspective.
    Nevertheless , this situation led to a split , some emigrating to Australia and Argentina while others stayed here (contacts were not welcome)
    Out of a population of roughly 290.000 in 1940, around 12.000 young men were sent out on the eastern front because of their so-called aryan background , few hundreds hid in abandoned mine shafts to escape . Do you really believe that out of these 12000 all went on a voluntary basis , they too had families and knew what would happen if they escaped/hid.
    As far as i know (correct me if i’m wrong) we were the only country organising a nationwide strike to protest German occupation and we payed it dearly with hundreds of people executed on the spot (hundreds out of a population of 290k at the time.
    Resistance and collaboration are very vague concepts, keep in mind that most resistance fighters joined during the last days of the war and that some of them were collaborators prior to that. A notorious collaborator even became France’s president for two terms.
    I’m from the Grand-Duchy of Luxemburg btw .

• [sigismund]

  @rebdav : you must be ignorant of the recent history of european countries, or at least, France. The thing, collaboration, is not a secret anymore since at least thirty years. In Paris, every single school who was active during the war has a plaque next its gate remembering the number of jewish children who used to go there, and who were sent to the camps.

  • [rebdav]

    I am very aware that collaborators are being outed as old men and women, but only a few individuals. What history has mostly washed away is that it was not just a few individuals who enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazi cleansing through murder machine, it was a very large percentage of that generation from the factory worker to the the supposedly enlightened university intelligentsia. It was only later in the war when taxation and strategic bombing became a burden that serious resentment and resistance really bloomed.

    9#- Dear Mr. Troll. Perhaps my earlier comments hit too close to home but I really suspect you were unaware due to a systemic lack of education, as my comments state, that many of the so called conquered of Europe were welcoming their liberators and an ethnically and ideologically pure European Union with open arms not unlike in the Rhineland or during the Anschluss.

    • [sigismund]

      So, for you, a factory worker -who could be at this time a single mother with her husband KIA or POW in Germany-, who had children to take care of,surely “enthusiastically collaborated ” with the great aryan reich ? Of course, there were many “better Hitler than red” ( besides a widespread idea in the pre-1941 US ), but it was certainly not a “very large percentage of that generation”.

• [Anonymous]

  One can’t help but be reminded of Snow Treasure http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Treasure-Marie-McSwigan/dp/0142402249/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281378579&sr=1-1 the story of Norwegian children assisting in the smuggling of gold out of occupied Norway.

• [grimc]

  From the back cover:

  …Looking back, it might be easy to say that the only right action was to resist the German occupation and to condemn those who didn’t. But the definitions of who was a collaborator and who was a resistor are not so clear-cut…Living in a country that has never been occupied, like the U.S., it is hard to imagine the pressures people faced…What seems obvious to us now was probably not at all obvious to anyone then…

• [Major Variola (ret)]

  How bout a comic book about a youngster who
  helps the resistance repel the western invaders from his hometown, Afghanistan? Or do we have to wait 50 years?

• [Anonymous]

  There’s nothing more fun than child soldiers. That’s why Sierra Leone is the Happiest Place on Earth.

  • [rebdav]

    When you have the choice of resist or be wiped out along with your whole small nation the choice is easier even for a kid. This was a war to conquer Europe, but more a war to rid the world of a certain despised non-belligerent unarmed minority.